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(Author’s Note: I haven’t posted anything on this blog in a couple months, and I know it’s been much longer since the weekly release schedule I’d been maintaining from November to February was in effect. This post should help explain what it is I’ve been working on.

Also, I haven’t updated this blog since I’ve started to come out to friends and family as a woman. Hi. I’m Dawn. Lost Again has been host to a lot of the fundamental essays that helped me work through my genderqueerness when I was first coming out as non-binary. However, in the years/months since I made those initial transitions, I’ve become more aware/accepting of and excited by my transfeminine nature and the way I feel about myself and the world around me as a trans woman. My pronouns are she/her.

In all likelihood, I’m going to try to find the pieces from this site that I want to save and migrate them to a new host for my essays and delete everything else at some point soon. I have over 1200 pieces on this site that I’ve written over the last seven years. The vast majority of the essays/reviews/recaps on this site were written when I was first learning how to write and also when I still identified as a man. I want the public face of my writing to be more polished, but I do want to keep the content that I’m still proud of. Thank you to everyone who has been a reader all of these years.)

I thought about my mother and my father a lot as I watched 20th Century Women, Mike Mill’s electric follow-up to his beloved sophomore feature, Beginners. 20th Century Women is about a teenage boy, Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann), raised in SoCal in the late 70s by his single mother, the engineer and independent spirit Dorothea Fields (Annette Bening). With Jamie’s father a non-presence in both Jamie and Dorothea’s life, Dorothea worries that she can’t sufficiently raise her son on her own and recruits two young women, ill photographer Abbie (Greta Gerwig) and troubled teenager Julie (Elle Fanning), to help shape her son into a whole person.

Up until I was twenty one years old, I wanted to be a cop. Specifically, I wanted to be a Fed, working public corruption cases. I had my whole beat figured out. Undergrad in political science and criminology. Law degree. FBI. Public office. I had neoliberal Appalachian rags-to-riches legislative ambitions.

I was making waves in WVU’s political science department as a potential candidate for the Truman scholarship. I was a well-respected RA in the school dorms, and I was active in student government. I had great grades, and I was heavily involved in a political summer camp for teenagers each year — where I was developing an important and formative friendship with an FBI agent. I had roots of fond supporters throughout the state.

That was the observation I fixated on as I watched Dekalog: Eight. My maternal grandfather’s family name is Swartz. “Swartz” was the Anglicization of the very German and very Jewish “Schwarz”, and it was the name that my forebears were given when they immigrated to America in the early 20th century. My narrow line of the Swartz tree settled in West Virginia, and at some point between the 1910s and the 2000s, our Jewish identity had become such a point of shame and was covered in such secrecy that my mother — a devout Evangelical Christian — was in her 40s before she found out she was Ashkenazim.

I was on the edge of oblivion the first weekend I saw Jason Isbell perform.

The 400 Unit was playing at Bonnaroo 2016, and I was barely a month removed from quitting my job as the Managing Editor of Baeble Music in New York City. I had moved back home to West Virginia to finish college (and because I couldn’t afford to live in Brooklyn anymore without my salaried job), and Bonnaroo was the final obligation I had to Baeble. It was the epilogue to my career as a music journalist.

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, but I’d be at Tina’s apartment tomorrow even if that holiday didn’t exist. Wednesday has become one of our regular date nights. Also Mondays… and also Fridays. We’re spending as much time together as not anymore. Tina gave me a key to their place last week. We’re both non-binary so we can’t really be lesbians, but I joked to them that we were probably U-Haul lesbians anyways. We’re trying to come up with a genderqueer version of that expression so we don’t misgender each other, but Avis Enbies doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Abigail’s father — Garret Jacob Hobbs, trophy hunter and infamous serial killer — has taken his teenage daughter hunting for the first time. Abigail bags her prey, and when she and her father take the deer back to her father’s cabin to be cleaned, Abigail is already regretting her actions. She discusses the emotional complexity and intelligence of deer with her father. She compares their capacity for personality to that of a four year old and appreciates the tender care they show for their environments.

Garret Jacob Hobbs, the Minnesota Shrike, proclaims his almost religious reverence for the sentience of these animals he hunts. He rationalizes their slaughter by telling Abigail that the ways they will use these animals in death honors their “sacrifice.” They will eat the meat. They will turn the bones into knives. The pelts can be used for clothes and pillows. Garret Jacob Hobbs knows that these beings have feelings, that they have an element of self-awareness, and that they can feel pain. He tells Abigail that hunting them would be murder if every element of the deer weren’t utilized after their deaths.

“Amuse-Bouche” features one of Hannibal‘s less memorable one-shot villains while also crafting one of the series’ most concise arguments for its own existence.

Eldon Stammets is a pharmacist with a penchant for inducing diabetic comas in his customers/victims. Stammets uses his victims’ still living bodies as fertilizer for a mushroom garden, deep in a Maryland forest. Like the Minnesota Shrike, Eldon sees a grand design in his crimes.

Of the many broken lives and abandoned rooms in What Remains of Edith Finch, the loss that haunted me the most was Lewis Finch.

The Finch family believed it was cursed. It wasn’t an entirely irrational belief. From the moment the Finch family crashed against America’s shores, Finches died young. Babies drowned in tubs. Children went missing. Parents were pushed from cliffs. Child stars were murdered as teenagers. Death was around every corner of the towering and haphazard Finch home and the island where the Finches lived.